PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, April 13, 2017, at 8:00
Friday, April 14, 2017, at 1:30
Saturday, April 15, 2017, at 8:00
Charles Dutoit Conductor
Chen Reiss Soprano
Matthias Goerne Baritone
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Director
Wagner
Good Friday Music from Parsifal
Honegger
Symphony No. 3 (Liturgique)
Dies irae: Allegro marcato
De profundis clamavi: Adagio
Dona nobis pacem: Andante
INTERMISSION
Fauré
Requiem, Op. 48
Introit and Kyrie
Offertorium
Sanctus
Pie Jesu
Agnus Dei
Libera me
In paradisum
CHEN REISS
MATTHIAS GOERNE
CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS
The appearances of Chen Reiss and Matthias Goerne are endowed in part by the John Ward Seabury
Distinguished Soloist Fund.
The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and
Kay Mabie.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT FM for its generous support as media sponsor
of the Classic Encounter series.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the National
Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Richard Wagner
Born May 22, 1813; Leipzig, Germany
Died February 13, 1883; Venice, Italy
Good Friday Music from Parsifal
On April 14, 1865,
Richard Wagner wrote to
his “adored and wonderful
friend” King Ludwig II
of Bavaria:
A warm and sunny
Good Friday, with
its mood of sacred
solemnity, once
inspired me with the idea of writing Parzifal:
since then it has lived on within me and
prospered, like a child in its mother’s womb.
With each Good Friday it grows a year
older, and I then celebrate the day of its
conception, knowing that its birthday will
follow one day.
Parsifal lived within Wagner for thirty-six years,
the longest gestation of any of his works, including
the entire Ring cycle. Wagner first read Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic Parzifal
on a summer holiday in Marienbad in 1845, and
was captivated with the story of a young man who
sets out to find his place in the world and instead
discovers human compassion and the Holy Grail.
But over the next years, his reading introduced
other subjects that he wanted to set to music first,
including the sixteenth-century guild of mastersingers and a magic ring. Still, the hero Parsifal
was never far from his thoughts. (Wagner changed
the spelling because he mistakenly thought that
Parsifal was Persian for “pure fool,” the perfect
representation of his guileless hero.) Wagner first
wrote an opera about the hero’s son, Lohengrin,
and later toyed with the idea of having Parsifal
appear at Tristan’s bedside. But Parsifal didn’t
take shape until a particularly lovely morning in
Temple of the Holy Grail as depicted by set designer
Paul von Joukowsky for act 3 of the first production of
Parsifal in 1882 at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Above: Wagner, photographed by Joseph Albert in 1882
COMPOSED
1877–81, complete music drama
FIRST PERFORMANCE
July 26, 1882; Bayreuth, Germany
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes, three oboes and english
horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet,
three bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
12 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
April 1 and 2, 1892,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
August 10, 1947, Ravinia Festival.
Pierre Monteux conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 25, 1954, Ravinia Festival. Pierre
Monteux conducting
May 25, 26, and 27, 2006, Orchestra
Hall. Daniel Barenboim conducting
CSO RECORDINGS
1958. Fritz Reiner conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 3: To Honor
the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of
Fritz Reiner)
1999. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Teldec
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1857, when he quickly sketched a drama in three
acts, later insisting, despite the evidence, that the
day was Good Friday. It was still another twenty
years before he actually began work on it, and the
score took him more than three years to complete.
Wagner always intended Parsifal to be his final
work, and, in fact, he died seven months after the
premiere was given in Bayreuth on July 26, 1882.
T he Good Friday Music drawn from
act 3 is often played in concert without
voices, for words are superfluous to the
symphonic flow of this music. This is the musical
climax of Parsifal, but it’s a climax of unusual
calm—a moment of astonishing repose that
signifies Parsifal’s new understanding of the
world around him. (The tonal stability of this
music—moving only from B major to a radiant
D major—stands in stunning contrast to the rest
of this highly chromatic, harmonically unsettled
score.) The heart of the scene is music of pastoral
grace, with a lovely oboe melody slowly unfolding over shimmering strings. Parsifal, according
to Wagner’s stage directions, “gazes in gentle
ecstasy upon field and forest, which are glowing
in the morning light.” Arthur Honegger
Born March 10, 1892; Le Havre, France
Died November 27, 1955; Paris, France
Symphony No. 3 (Liturgique)
By the end of 1945, the
world was a very different
place from that January,
when Arthur Honegger
began this wartime
symphony. Victory in
Europe came on May 7,
and in the Pacific on
August 15. The deaths of
Anton Webern on
September 15, accidentally shot by an American
soldier, and of Béla Bartók, in a New York
hospital room later that month, marked a
changing of the guard in the music world as well.
It was also a time of symphonies that reflected
this period of upheaval and renewal. In August,
Stravinsky, the great stoic, finished a Symphony
in Three Movements that, nearly twenty years
later, he admitted was “written under the
impression of world events” and inspired by
goose-stepping soldiers and war machines. In
1946, both Darius Milhaud and Honegger
completed third symphonies—Milhaud’s
subtitled Te Deum, Honegger’s Liturgique—that
are powerful responses to the horrors of war.
Honegger and Milhaud had first attracted
attention in the 1920s, as members of the group
of French composers known as Les six, although
history has cut that number in half, remembering just those two along with Francis Poulenc.
Honegger was something of an outsider in Les
six—he got involved almost by accident, and he
Above: Honegger, photographed by Herbert List in 1944
COMPOSED
1945–46
FIRST PERFORMANCE
August 17, 1946; Zurich, Switzerland
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes, two oboes and english
horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, piano, timpani,
bass drum, tenor drum, tam-tam,
cymbals, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
33 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
October 26 and 27, 1961, Orchestra
Hall. André Cluytens conducting
July 24, 1962, Ravinia Festival. André
Cluytens conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
April 5 and 6, 2001, Orchestra Hall.
Antonio Pappano conducting
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never could stomach the pranksterish music of
Eric Satie, who inspired the group
and served as its spiritual mentor. Besides,
technically, he wasn’t even French. In I Am a
Composer, he writes, “I am what the language
of passports calls of ‘dual nationality,’ that is to
say, a combination of French and Swiss.” Born
in Le Havre, he had studied composition first
in Zurich, his parents’ hometown, and then
commuted to Paris for two years to work at the
conservatory. In 1913—Honegger was nineteen—he settled in Paris, later claiming that,
despite his Swiss upbringing, “all the rest—my
intellectual blossoming, the sharpening of my
moral and spiritual values—I owe to France.”
Among the qualities he owed to Switzerland,
Honegger listed “a naïve sense of honesty” and
his knowledge of the Bible, though he might also
have mentioned his lifelong love of Bach, whose
cantatas he heard regularly in the Protestant
church of his youth.
Honegger achieved almost overnight fame in
1921 for his oratorio Le roi David (King David),
and he caused a stir two years later with Pacific
231, a high-speed tone poem named after a locomotive (in fact, the title was an afterthought).
He didn’t write a symphony until 1931, when
Serge Koussevitzky commissioned one for the
fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, and he didn’t compose another for ten
years. Then, in the 1940s, he wrote four more,
beginning with the grim Second Symphony,
inspired by the fall of Paris to the Germans, and
continuing with the Third, written in the last
months of the war and completed in the hopeful
days that followed.
Honegger described his Third Symphony as
“a drama in which there are three actors: misery,
happiness, and humanity.” He subtitled the work
“liturgical” to emphasize the religious character
of the music, and gave each of the three movements a title drawn from the Roman Catholic liturgy, erroneously leading “experts” (as Honegger
called them) to detect Gregorian plainchant
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in its melodies. (There isn’t a trace, although
Honegger wrote certain themes that do mirror
the inflections of the Latin movement titles.) The
symphony is a musical response to “the tide of
barbarism, stupidity, suffering, mechanization,
and bureaucracy that has beset us during recent
years.” If there is a drama, as Honegger suggests,
it takes place within man’s heart—“between
surrender to the blind forces that entrap him and
the impulse to happiness, the love of peace, and
the sense of divine refuge.”
T he opening movement takes its title, Dies
irae (Day of wrath), from the Requiem
Mass. It begins chaotically and then
gathers force as a fierce, unrelenting march.
Honegger’s music suggests the shrill soundtracks
of countless newsreels and movies produced
during the war. “I wanted to portray man’s terror
in the face of divine anger,” he wrote. The movement is noisy and driven for long stretches, and a
horrible tension still hangs in the air, even when
the music fades at the close.
The long, sustained Adagio is titled De profundis clamavi (Out of the depths I cry to you),
a line from Psalm 129. It is a single, unbroken
flow of nonrepeating melody. “I think of the
highest form of melody as being like rainbows,”
Honegger writes in I Am a Composer, a vision
he has perfectly realized in the continuous,
arching character of this lyrical, grief-stricken
movement. A single flute takes flight in the last
moments—the innocent sound of birdsong in a
blighted landscape.
Honegger’s finale—Dona nobis pacem (Grant
us peace), the last line of the Agnus Dei—
begins tragically, ultimately bursting with rage.
Honegger must confront the horror of war before
praying for peace. (The menacing march with
which the movement begins was the first music
Honegger heard in his head before he started to
compose this symphony.) The benediction is a
serene chorale in the strings, embellished at the
end by birdsong. Gabriel Fauré
Born May 12, 1845; Pamiers, Ariège, France
Died November 4, 1924; Passy (a suburb of Paris), France
Requiem
In his old age, Gabriel
Fauré remembered that as
a child he spent hours
playing the harmonium in
the chapel adjacent to the
school where his father
worked. An old blind lady,
who often dropped by to
listen, pointed out the
boy’s gifts to his father. At
the age of nine he was sent to Paris to study at the
Ecole Niedermeyer. He studied Gregorian chant,
organ, and the great works of Renaissance
polyphony; Camille Saint-Saëns became his
teacher there in 1861, and opened the door wide
to a fresh new world of music, including that of
Robert Schumann, who became one of Fauré’s
favorite composers, as well as the work of Liszt
and Wagner, who were then the powerful and
controversial contemporary composers of the day.
A musical life begun in the organ loft and
fortified with years of training in the history and
theory of sacred music ideally prepared Fauré
for a life in the service of church music. His first
appointment was as organist of Saint-Sauveur
at Rennes. (He scandalized the priest when
he played organ in the church scene at a local
performance of Gounod’s Faust.) There followed
a number of other posts—in Clignancourt, and
then at Saint-Honoré d’Eylau and Saint-Sulpice
in Paris. Eventually, he substituted for SaintSaëns at the Madeleine in Paris, and was named
choirmaster there when Saint-Saëns resigned
in 1877. His “mercenary job,” as he eventually
called it, left little time for composing music; like
Mahler, he found that of necessity he became a
summer composer.
Oddly, Fauré wrote no organ music at all, aside
from a few student efforts, and very little church
music of any kind. Alongside several brief motets,
a number of settings of the “Ave Maria,” and the
Cantique de Jean Racine—the work that earned his
first prize in composition, in 1865, on graduation
from the Niedermeyer school—the Requiem
stands alone as his one large-scale sacred work.
Indeed, in a career marked by a fondness for
songs, chamber music, and incidental music, the
Requiem towers in solitary splendor.
Fauré began the Requiem in 1887, simply
“for the pleasure of it,” though the death of his
father in 1885, and of his mother two years
later, no doubt gave it a sense of purpose and
growing urgency. He led the first performance
at the Madeleine in January 1888, at a “firstclass” funeral for a wealthy parishioner. It was
not the work we know today; there were just five
Above: Fauré, painted by John Singer Sargent, ca. 1889. Museum of Music, Cité de la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris
COMPOSED
1887
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 16, 1888; Paris, France
INSTRUMENTATION
soprano and baritone soloists, fourpart mixed chorus, two flutes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, three trombones, harp,
timpani, organ, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
38 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 29 and 30, 1962, Orchestra
Hall. Adele Addison and John Reardon
as soloists, Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Margaret Hillis, director), Hans
Rosbaud conducting
June 18, 1964, Ravinia Festival.
Barbara Garrison and Howard Nelson
as soloists, Harvard Glee Club and
Radcliffe Choral Society (Elliot Forbes,
director), Seiji Ozawa conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
January 27, 28, 29, and 30, 1993,
Orchestra Hall. Renée Fleming
and Andreas Schmidt as soloists,
Chicago Symphony Chorus (Vance
George, guest director), Daniel
Barenboim conducting
CSO RECORDING
1968. Agnes Giebel and Gérard
Souzay, soloists, Chicago Symphony
Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director),
Jean Martinon conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 13: Chicago
Symphony Chorus: A Fortieth
Anniversary Celebration)
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movements, and the accompaniment was limited
to a handful of low strings, harp, timpani, and
organ, with a violin solo in the Sanctus. For a
performance given in 1893, Fauré added two
movements for baritone solo and chorus: the
Offertory, written in 1889, and Libera me, an
independent piece dating from 1877, originally
scored for baritone and organ. Fauré also added
horn and trumpet parts and a violin line to the
In paradisum. (The 1893 version has recently
been reconstructed, performed, and recorded.)
The familiar score of the Requiem—and the
one used at these performances—is yet a third
version, with a fuller orchestral accompaniment,
that was performed in July 1900, first in Lille
and then in Paris, with 250 performers. Fauré’s
involvement in this version has never been clear.
It is likely that Fauré’s publisher ordered the full
symphonic scoring to encourage more concert
performances; it is possible that Fauré turned
much of the work over to his student Jean RogerDucasse. The printed score of 1901 is something
of a mess, which suggests that the fastidious
composer never even saw the publisher’s proofs.
Even in its full-scale version, Fauré’s Requiem
is music of profound understatement. The instrumentation is discreet and modest. The violas and
cellos are often subdivided into two lines each,
heightening the dark and somber mood; the
violins do not enter until the third movement,
the Sanctus, and even then all play in unison. As
Fauré wrote to Eugene Ysaÿe in 1900, “You’ll see
how angelic the violins are in the Sanctus after
all those violas!!!” There are flutes and clarinets in
the Pie Jesu only, and trumpets just in the Kyrie
and Sanctus; the trombones and timpani are
saved for the Libera me. At no point do all the
instruments play together.
In 1902, Fauré wrote to a friend that he saw
death “as a joyful deliverance, an aspiration
towards a happiness beyond the grave, rather
than as a painful experience.” That sensibility
helps explain the tone of this wondrously serene,
yet deeply expressive music. Fauré saw death as
a comfort; his music lends deeper understanding
to the phrase “rest in peace”; there is no wrenching Day of Judgment. Fauré chose his texts to
underline his beliefs; he does not set the great
Dies irae, which inspired Berlioz and Verdi to
outbursts of fierce and fiery music. (The gentle
Pie Jesu is the only passage of that text Fauré
includes.) The word requiem appears in five of
the seven movements, and is, literally, both the
first and the last word. (Fauré may well have chosen to end with the In paradisum text, in order to
have that word at the closing.) Though the music
is almost uniformly contemplative and delicate, it
is never clinical or chaste; in fact, Fauré specifically asked for bright and sonorous sopranos, not
“old goats who have never known love.”
After 1900, the large orchestral version
immediately supplanted the earlier, chamberlike
settings, and was widely performed. It is that
version of the Requiem that was sung at the
Madeleine in Paris, in November 1924, at Fauré’s
own funeral service. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
In Memoriam
PAMELA L. McGAAN (1965–2016)
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association and the Women’s
Board dedicate the April 15, 2017, concert to the memory of
Pamela L. McGaan, founding member of the Women’s Board and a
passionate supporter of the CSO. In addition to her work on behalf
of the Orchestra, Pam was a loving wife, the mother of three children,
an accomplished musician, and an engaged member of the community.
Pam was a light and an inspiration to all who met her.
Symphony Ball 2013
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REQUIEM
1. INTROIT AND KYRIE
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
Lord, grant them eternal rest,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Te decet hymnus, Deus in Sion,
You shall have praise in Zion, O God,
et tibi redetur votum and homage shall be paid to you
in Jerusalem. in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam.
Hear my prayer.
Ad te omnis caro veniet.
All flesh shall come before you.
Kyrie eleison.
Lord, have mercy.
Christe eleison.
Christ, have mercy.
2. OFFERTORIUM
O Domine Jesu Christe, rex gloriae,
libera animas defunctorum
de poenis inferni,
et de profundo lacu.
O Domine Jesu Christe, rex gloriae,
libera animas defunctorum
de ore leonis,
ne absorbeat Tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum.
Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory,
deliver the souls of the departed
from the pains of hell,
and from the depths of the pit.
Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory,
deliver the souls of the departed
from the mouth of the lion,
lest hell engulf them,
lest they fall into darkness.
Hostias et preces tibi, Domine,
Lord, in praise we offer you
laudis offerimus:
sacrifices and prayers:
tu suscipe pro animabus illis,
accept them on behalf of those souls
quarum hodie memoriam facimus:
whom we remember this day:
fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam,
Lord, make them pass from death to life,
quam olim Abrahae promisisti, as once you promised to Abraham,
et semini ejus. and to his seed.
Amen.Amen.
3. SANCTUS
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,
Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.
Osanna in excelsis.
Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God of hosts!
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
4. PIE JESU
Pie Jesu, Domine, dona eis requiem;
dona eis sempiternam requiem.
Gentle Lord Jesus, grant them rest;
grant them eternal rest.
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5. AGNUS DEI
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata Lamb of God, you take away the sins
mundi, of the world,
dona eis requiem.
grant them rest.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata Lamb of God, you take away the sins
mundi, of the world,
dona eis requiem.
grant them rest.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata Lamb of God, you take away the sins
mundi, of the world,
dona eis requiem sempiternam.
grant them eternal rest.
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
May eternal light shine upon them,
with your saints forever,
for you are compassionate.
Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
and may perpetual light shine upon them.
6. LIBERA ME
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna
in die illa tremenda,
quando caeli movendi sunt et terra,
dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
Deliver me, Lord, from everlasting death
on that awful day
when heaven and earth will be moved,
when you will come to judge the world by fire.
Tremens factus sum ego et timeo,
dum discussio venerit atque ventura ira.
I am made to tremble and am afraid
because of the judgment and wrath to come.
Dies illa, dies irae,
calamitatis et miseriae;
dies illa, dies magna et amara valde.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
That day, that day of wrath,
of calamity and misery;
a great and bitter day.
Lord, grant them eternal rest,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
7. IN PARADISUM
In paradisum deducant angeli;
May the angels lead you into paradise;
in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres
may the martyrs receive you at your coming
et perducant te in civitatem sanctam and lead you into the holy city
Jerusalem.of Jerusalem.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat,
et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere,
aeternam habeas requiem.
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May the choir of angels receive you,
and with Lazarus, once poor,
may you have eternal rest.
© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra